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Free Xamarin subscription for indie game developers

I've just read the announcement on the Xamarin blog about providing indie game developers with a free subscription to the Xamarin platform with Visual Studio and I was wondering if there are other T&Cs other than those mentioned in the blog post? For example, can the subscription only be used for games or can it also be used to develop mobile applications?

I've now received my complimentary Xamarin subscription (thanks Xamarin!) but I'd also like to know if this is just for a year? It says it will auto-renew, but I want to know if I'm going to be charged the normal rate when it does auto-renew.

Hey all
The subscription is for one year. The software will continue to work after the subscription expires, but you will no longer have free access to updates unless you renew (or are eligible for a renewal through whatever community programs we're running at that time ).

I'm planning on getting a indie license and would love to develop entirely on VS.

Any chance there will be some kind of 'late christmas gifts' for the rest of use so we can afford a VS license for iOS development ?. (I find the jump price jump from xamarin to VS very steep, and out of my price range).

Are these still being processed? I applied for this in December and have been awaiting a response. I'm sure there was a big response for this but I wanted to make sure I haven't fallen through the cracks.

I met all the criteria for this offer, per the post by @JosephHill on the Xamarin blog, and also the actual application form. And I even got an email from Xamarin with a link to activate my free subscription. When I followed the link, it said I needed to contact support to change from monthly to yearly. When I did so, the support person told me that because I've been a customer of Xamarin, I am ineligible for the free subscription.

I don't want to be a whiny customer demanding free stuff. That said, if a company makes a promise to people and then reneges on it, it's okay to call them out. I think it's important to point out publicly that whatever industry/marketing karma Xamarin benefited from when people read about this offer was not entirely deserved. They said they love indie game developers and were giving them free stuff if they met "x, y, z" qualifications, and then they didn't follow through.

I'm annoyed, but obviously the monthly fee I'm paying is worth it to me, or else I wouldn't pay it. And perhaps it's a let-down to realize that Xamarin loves my money more than they love me as an indie game developer... and that one of my favorite companies can be really obnoxious and dishonest at times... but c'est la vie.

Fortunately, indie game development is cool enough that it is its own reward in many ways. Not a whole lot so far in terms of (ahem) income, but I published to app stores for iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows 8, and Windows Phone from the same code base. Pretty wild stuff, and if it doesn't amount to anything else, at least an intellectually fulfilling hobby.

Side note -- in the form for free indie game dev subscriptions (link below), it asked for "Frameworks used to publish games" and one of the choices was "Monogame". Wouldn't the moment when I chose that option have been a better time for Xamarin to tell me that current customers are ineligible for the free subscription?

@AndyVogan Can you create a new personal account for the free subscription we provided you? If this won't work for you, please email me directly - [email protected] We'll make it right.

I'm not sure why the "not eligible for existing customers" text was omitted from this offer. We usually include that caveat on these offers. Leaving that text out was poor-form, and I apologize for not catching that.

For background, the purpose of that restriction is two-fold:

1) reduce the risk of abuse by paying customers that do not legitimately qualify for the offer (think of paying customers with Business accounts linked to business email addresses).
2) reduce the support overhead of converting Indie accounts (which requires non-trivial effort) and verifying that customers are not abusing the offer per (1) above.

So, for clarity: The purpose of the restriction isn't to go after existing Indie customers to make them pay even if they are eligible for the offer, but rather to ensure that these offers do not interfere with our day-to-day business. Hope that background is helpful.

This is a very generous gift on the part of Xamarin and I appreciate it very much. In a future update of my game I will add Xamarin to the "Thanks" section of the About screen along with Microsoft BizSpark, Monogame, and other open source tools/libraries I used.